We like to call this a village but it has no services nowadays though the school bus collects and returns children daily and takes older inhabitants to town and to their club on Thursdays. Just down the road from my flat is the local ‘four banal’. No longer in use, this communal oven would bake the villagers’ bread every week. Its simple arch construction and inset iron door can be seen repeated in many small villages around the area. Here it is the destination of the first level mountain walk for the ‘curistes’ who come to take the waters every summer in Brides-les-Bains. They arrive, a bit puffed and pink with their backpacks, high tech walking sticks and professional boots and collect outside my house while the young seasonal worker acting as their guide points out the ‘four banal’ and tells them stories of old country life. I have listened to lots of these this summer, being housebound for a while and I can tell you that the tale varies with the teller and changes every time. The supposed origins of the village name are anything he or she feels like saying. Most then don’t actually walk the thirty metres to look at the ‘four’, they fill up their water bottles, take pictures of my balcony and choose to go down the hill again having tackled the mountain enough for one day. The former fire station which stands just over the water trough is ignored which is a pity since it contains an ancient wooden appliance, various rolled canvas and leather hoses, buckets and other fire-fighting equipment from an earlier time. Dialing 18 nowadays fetches the team of ‘pompiers’ from Moûtiers or Bozel, both six kilometres away.
It was with the ‘pompiers’ of Pralognan that I did my PS1 course for First Aid on Friday. A very long day’s training showed me what their duties extend to. They are paramedics far more often than fire fighters but they are also responsible for training the populace in First Aid responses. In Moûtiers they make sure every employee is informed of procedures in the event of an industrial accident. There are several potentially hazardous businesses in this confined mountain valley. A high grade steel used to be made here at a works sited just beyond the railway. This steel would then be sent ten kilometres up the valley to Ugine where it was pressed into cutlery. Any misshapes were sent back for re-smelting in the town. But it is the chemical works which causes the most concern at nearby Pomblière so it is their siren which local inhabitants must recognise and react to.
Moûtiers lies at the joining of three valleys and the pass is narrow. The fast dual carriageway comes through and at the narrowest point flies directly over a traditional farmstead which must have no view at all today. I know he will have been well compensated but his sad looking farm buildings are in a way a symbol for progress in the valley. People still complain of the smell and fumes from the Carbone de Savoie factory just before the town. There, in a hotchpotch of coloured corrugated sheds and shacks industrial carbon is produced for electrical motors. My neighbour Gilbert remembers how, during his childhood the air was unbreathable at Bozel where ‘Nobel Bozel’ produced chemicals for the explosives industry. You will be interested to know that it was this same ‘Alfred Nobel’ whose invention of guncotton as a method of stabilising nitro-glycerine, thereby creating a much more powerful explosive, won him the first of the prizes bearing his name and enabled the First World War to be conducted. The pretty lake at Bozel where Kate and I swam this summer was set up, it is said, on their condemned land. At any rate, fifty years ago, Gilbert was forbidden to go near it.
So what is Moûtiers today, this town which in the year 800AD received a legacy from Charlemagne, France’s greatest king and first Emperor. Three years before his death this fine and noble ruler (whose name means ‘Charles the Great’) wrote his Will, dividing up two thirds of his riches between the 21 metropolitan cities of his realm. So on the list, along with Rome, Vienna, Saltzburg, Cologne, Bordeaux and Lyon is Moûtiers-en-Tarentaise. What the legacy amounted to I don’t yet know, but each of these towns had a chest with its name written on it. One day next spring I will go and investigate. You can see from these names how he fought for and ruled most of Italy, Germany, Austria and France. His conquests gave rise to some of the richest literatures of medieval France and Germany. The ‘prix Charlemagne’ is still periodically given to a person judged to have done the most in the spirit of a united Europe. Nowadays Moûtiers is where people shop. My bank and physiotherapist are in Brides, my garage and occasional hairdresser are in Bozel. My dentist (and this year my surgeon) are in Moûtiers. Since I am still working on improving my flat I go there also for DIY and hardware and a choice of three supermarkets and of course, the station. It’s a crossroads in the valleys leading up roads which become ever more narrow and twisty towards Chamonix, the glacier at Tignes, the skiing resorts of my three valleys and down to Albertville and the motorways of France.
A large proportion of the local population is employed in tourism, many of them on a seasonal basis. Traditionally, Savoyards, renowned for their strength, were chimneysweeps throughout France. In the best Paris hotels and restaurants it is Savoyards who are the ‘écailleurs’ who open the oysters at table and for some reason only a Savoyard may be a ’col rouge’ and work at the Hotel Druot, the French equivalent of Christie’s. In the village there are still many members of the Chedal Anglay family, the youngest being my neighbour Fabienne’s sons and the oldest Angèle who is 90 and still takes the bus to town. This branch of the Chedals is descended from the Savoyards whose masonry skills were sought by Edward the first when he was building the string of castles along the border with Wales to keep the Welsh under control. They became known as the ‘Anglays’.
Its winter now and the light in Moûtiers is a bluish colour in the daytime, the sun no longer reaches the valley floor. It’s a cold place like my village, where we lose the sun for a full six weeks. It will reappear on the 20th January, touching first the chimney of my hous. I start my work tomorrow so I shall not see much of that anyway. Roll on January.
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copyright Julia Austen 2015